We are delighted to announce a series of projects that have successfully applied for CIRCLE Strategic Funds for 2024/25. These projects represent a significant step forward in advancing CIRCLE’s research agenda, strengthening interdisciplinary collaborations, and expanding the impact of our work across diverse domains of care.
Successful applications
Matthias Benzer, Will Mason and Ella Monkcom, who lead the Theorising Care Theme, have successfully applied to the CIRCLE Strategic Fund to support them to produce a journal special issue focussing on the ways in which the organisation, funding, assessment, and regulation of care configures and reconfigures social relationships. This will involve a one-day workshop on the topic open to interested parties. This is an exciting opportunity to draw together innovative theoretical contributions across CIRCLE, and to raise the profile of our work.
Ankita Mishra, Lauren White and PJ Annand, lead for the CIRCLE digital care theme, have been awarded CIRCLE Strategic Funding for innovative knowledge exchange activity to bring CIRCLE’s research to new audiences through the transformation of CIRCLE research into a graphic novel/comic. CIRCLE researchers will be invited to submit an expression of interest to have their research transformed into a comic by a professional illustrator. Upon completion of the research comic, a Graphic Novel Reading Room will be facilitated in a community arts space (Utopia Theatre), inviting members of the public–including people with lived experience of care and caring–to engage with the research comic together. A digital version will also be made available, with audio-description, ensuring wider accessibility. The project will produce a legacy resource to be used beyond its lifecycle, extending this value. It will also support a subsequent funding application aimed at establishing CIRCLE as a leading advocate for ‘Graphic Social Care’—an emerging innovative domain of scholarly activity inspired by the well-established ‘Graphic Medicine’ movement.
Maria Teresa Ferazzoli and Julie Walsh have successfully applied to the CIRCLE Strategic Fund to undertake a structured series of meetings aimed at exploring potentials, challenges, and good examples of working in collaboration with mental health professionals to produce high quality and impactful co-produced research. Building on a successful meeting on better mental health research, this is a scoping activity aimed at exploring the blended learning network model applied by the IMPACT network to develop partnerships between academia and non-academic stakeholders interested in a similar topic. It will produce a pilot ‘model practice’ resource for the development of partnerships between academia and non-academic stakeholders which can be used by CIRCLE and other researchers. In addition, it provides an opportunity to explore a new potential CIRCLE research theme around mental health and identify potential theme members.
Harrie Churchill, Julie Walsh and Becky Driscoll, theme leads for CIRCLE’s Children and Families group, have been awarded CIRCLE Strategic Funds to continue their important work engaging with key stakeholders in the region. This will include organising a stakeholder event in Sheffield to establish a wider community of practice to work with the research group, providing opportunities for researchers, children, young people, families, practitioners and community and voluntary sector organisations to generate new research ideas, explore potential partnerships, and collaborate on grant applications - with a particular focus on encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration, identifying pressing co-produced research questions, and investigating under-researched areas.
We are particularly pleased to be co-funding two projects with the Neuroscience Institute, as part of their ‘Neuroscience in Society’ stream. Both will be led by early career researchers from the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience, and providing excellent opportunities for us to engage across faculties.
Bryony Waters-Harvey, Alys Griffiths, and Louis Stokes will undertake a small-scale pilot project for a future grant application examining the complexities of delivering person-centred care in residential care settings. Care home research typically focuses on individual person-centred care, and tends to neglect collective dynamics. This research project will focus on staff decision making and the potential for decisions affecting all residents to be based on one person’s needs, undermining person-centred care, as well as the Mental Capacity Act. It will explore the prevalence of such scenarios and decision-making models influencing them, so as to develop reflective resources for staff. It will also facilitate cross-disciplinary learning and collaboration with CIRCLE members, and explore the potential development of a new theme around care homes.
Louis Stokes, Alys Griffiths, Bryony Waters-Harvey, Sara Fovargue, Victoria Shepherd, and Louise Taylor will use CIRCLE Strategic Funds to utilise early findings from their ongoing NIHR-funded research on Enhancing Implementation of the Mental Capacity Act which indicate that care home staff receive insufficient support to translate capacity legislation into practice. Stimulation funding will enable them to utilise early data as a springboard to new lines of inquiry regarding the intersection between unwise decisions, capacity and care home staff acting to limit professional risk, guiding new potential funding schemes. Scenarios will be developed and used as discussion starters at a World Café event which will promote CIRCLE. This will involve engagement from legal/ethical practice, care regulators, commissioners, researchers, and care home staff. It has the potential to further strengthen the potential new theme concerned with care homes.
Please look out for a further call for stimulation funds in the next academic year. To make sure you don’t miss out on this - and on opportunities to engage with these and other CIRCLE initiatives - sign up to our mailing list by emailing circle@sheffield.ac.uk.